Gregory Michael, obstetrician and gynaecologist, died 16 days after being vaccinated against the coronavirus in Florida, United States. If the cause of his death has not yet been established by the health authorities, the investigations are still ongoing
- Sixteen days after being vaccinated at his workplace, Gregory Michael, obstetrician and gynaecologist in Miami, died of internal bleeding linked to a rare blood pathology.
- According to numerous publications on social networks, the cause of his death would be directly linked to the injection of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine against the coronavirus.
- The investigations carried out by the American health authorities have not yet been able to establish the causes of Gregory Michael’s death.
The vaccine against the coronavirus Covid-19 he caused the death of an American doctor? While nearly 10 million people have already been vaccinated against the coronavirus in the United States, numerous publications on social networks claim that Gregory Michael, an obstetrician working in Florida, died on January 4th, sixteen days after received the vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech.
According to the Associated Press agency, US health authorities are investigating the death of Gregory Michael, an American obstetrician and gynaecologist. This 56-year-old doctor, working at Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he was vaccinated against Covid-19 on December 18, died on January 4th, 2021, from a blood disorder: immunological thrombocytopenic purpura, or ITP, which is characterized by the destruction of platelets in the blood, preventing the blood from clotting properly.
Pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which said on Tuesday that it was actively investigating the causes of Gregory Michael’s death, said at present it did not believe in a “direct connection between his death and injection of the vaccine, ”as reported by the Bloomberg news agency .
The cause of death has not yet been determined
In a Facebook post dated January 6th, Heïdi Neckelmann, the wife of Gregory Michael, spoke about the circumstances of her husband’s death. It is its publication, shared more than 64,000 times, which was then taken up, sometimes identically, abroad and in France.
According to her, three days after receiving the vaccine, Gregory Michael would have seen small red spots, called petechiae – a minor haemorrhage caused by the infiltration of blood under the skin – on his feet and hands. Recognizing the danger, the obstetrician reportedly went to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Medical Center who, alerted by an extremely low blood platelet count, diagnosed him with ITP and transferred to an intensive care unit.
For two weeks, a team of experts “from all over the country” would have tried, without success, to raise the level of platelets Gregory Michael, explains his wife. “Energetic and conscious” throughout, he would have died of an internal haemorrhage which would have carried him away in a few minutes, “two days before the operation of the last chance”. Heïdi Neckelmann told the New York Times that her husband had never suffered from major medical problems, nor had reactions to drugs or vaccines in the past.
Citing medical secrecy, the Mount Sinai medical centre refused to answer questions from the New York daily. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US federal body in charge of public health, meanwhile assured that they will continue to assess the situation as more information becomes available. The Miami-Dade County medical examiner is still investigating and has yet to release the autopsy results or identify the cause of death.
A very rare reaction to vaccination cannot be excluded
While investigations are still ongoing, some experts believe the rare condition that swept away Gregory Michael could be an extremely rare form of reaction to vaccination. Dr Jerry Lee Spivak, a John Hopkins University blood disease expert who was not involved in the care of Gregory Michael, told The New York Times that the vaccine’s implication in the death of the obstetrician was “medical evidence”. He bases his assertion on the description made by Heïdi Neckelmann and on the triggering of an ITP within such a short period (3 days) in a man in good health and of a relatively young age. This reaction, which he describes as “very rare” should not, however, prevent the population from being vaccinated, according to him.
Similar reactions, transient and therefore much less serious, have already been observed in patients with measles, or who have been vaccinated against it. “We have to stay vigilant and see if this kind of thing happens again. […] For the moment we are only making assumptions, tempers Paul Offit, a specialist in vaccines and infectious diseases at the hospital for children of Philadelphia with the New York Times, adding that correlation does not necessarily mean causality.
According to Jerry Lee Spivak, there are many treatments available to treat ITP. It would therefore be crucial to know more about the death of Gregory Michael so that doctors can manage as effectively as possible patients in whom the same type of reaction would occur.
